


to die would be an awfully great adventure

by emullz



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood and Injury, Death, F/M, but not really?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 14:15:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5589232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emullz/pseuds/emullz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke died for the first time on her ninth birthday. Bellamy had seen enough crime shows to know that this was it, she was gone, and he’d have to wear a suit to her funeral and throw dirt on her grave. And then she coughed, and her neck was cracking as she twisted it back in the right direction. “I ruined my party dress,” Clarke said, startled, at the same time Bellamy burst out “you died.” </p>
<p>or, the extremely morbid au in which bellamy and clarke fall in love because of magic they can't explain</p>
            </blockquote>





	to die would be an awfully great adventure

**Author's Note:**

> based on a tumblr post i found one night about everyone having little magic, and then it turned into this and idk what it is totally but anyways. 
> 
> title from peter pan because why not

Clarke died for the first time on her ninth birthday. She’d taken Bellamy’s piece of cake and was waving it triumphantly above her head, and Bellamy was chasing her, and they were laughing, and when she slipped down the stairs, the blood mingled with the chocolate cake, mingled with Bellamy’s tears as he sat among the concrete floor of her unfinished basement. Her neck turned in a way that wasn’t natural, a way that made Bellamy want to heave up the contents of his stomach. 

Clarke’s eyes were open, and there was blood in her eyelashes, dripping off of her forehead. Bellamy had her head in his lap and he was rocking back and forth. He’d seen enough crime shows to know that this was it, she was gone, and he’d have to wear a suit to her funeral and throw dirt on her grave. And then she coughed, and her neck was cracking as she twisted it back in the right direction. 

“I ruined my party dress,” Clarke said, startled, at the same time Bellamy burst out “you died.” 

Clarke blinked. 

“I think I’m okay now.” She sat up, cautious, and Bellamy wiped his eyes. Tears diluted the streaks of blood, and Clarke scrubbed at the mixture with her sleeve. “I don’t want to tell anyone.” 

Bellamy took in the rivulets of red on Clarke’s forehead, the skull fragments on the floor. “It’s a secret,” he agreed. 

\- -

By the time Bellamy went to college, Clarke had died five times. Every time it happened, she would call and Bellamy would come running, to wash the seawater out of her hair or to get the blood out of the carpet. He was worried, going so far away, that she would have to do it all herself, to drown in her secrets. He sometimes wondered if she only had a certain number of chances, and that thought terrified him.

The night he packed up his room, Clarke sat cross legged on his bed and held both of his hands in hers. “It’s like this,” she said, her hair braided off her face in complicated swirls. “Everyone has these little magics, things they can do that nobody else can. Like how Jasper can untie knots and Octavia always rolls the right number on a pair of dice. Mine is just another little magic, and it’s not going to run out if you live farther away.” 

“You think this is magic?” Bellamy asked, staring into the blue of Clarke’s eyes, the very same one’s he’d seen with no Clarke behind them so many times. “You dying every time I turn around?” 

“I think I have a knack for managing to die before my time,” Clarke responded, the amount of calm she exuded immeasurable. “And I think I’ll be fine.” 

\- -

Bellamy watched the bullet enter Clarke’s brain on national television. They’d Skyped the night before, Clarke gushing about how excited she was that Wells was getting honored in front of the city council for all the charity work he was doing and how she didn’t even mind having to wear the heels and the hair pins. 

Some kid had come in through the service door with a gun she’d gotten who knows where and started shooting. Clarke was in the front row, and pieces of her brain were spattered on the front of Mayor Jaha’s shirt, and Bellamy was reminded suddenly of the Jackson Pollock print that Clarke had pinned onto her bedroom wall. Clarke’s friend was on the ground with a bullet in his stomach, and he was reaching for her in the footage they showed of the shooting, his fingers grasping desperately and blood bubbling out from his lips. 

It made Bellamy paralyzed in fear, the amount of time it took for her to come back. It seemed like each time, she would stay a little bit longer on the other side before returning and gripping Bellamy’s hands like a lifeline.

This time, he didn’t mind.

\- -

The eighth time Clarke died, Bellamy almost went crazy. She was pulling her laptop charger out of the wall and it sparked, the electricity arcing through her body and making her hair stand on end. There was a sort of macabre humor to the whole event, like out of all the times Clarke’s heart had stopped beating, all the tragic ways for her to let go, she finally bit the bullet after being shocked by an electrical outlet. 

He didn’t get to collect on his punchline, though, because Clarke woke up a few minutes later with her usual cough and inspection of her clothes. Her favorite sweater, the one she’d taken from Bellamy’s closet when he stopped living in the dorms and she’d helped him move, smelled like burning hair and static. “Damn,” she hissed, running her hand through her hair. “All my fucking clothes-“ 

“I can’t do this,” Bellamy muttered from his perch on the couch. Clarke gazed at him, confused and still on the floor with her fingers wrapped around the cord of her charger. “I can’t sit here and watch you lie there, dead, waiting for you to either wake up or rot.”

Clarke coughed again, held up a hand for Bellamy to hold on a minute.

“You called it magic,” Bellamy pressed on, “the fact that you somehow manage to kill yourself and leave trails of blood and bone behind you wherever you go. Your little ‘knack’ for coughing yourself back into existence is fucking magic, but you know what doesn’t feel like magic? The fact that I get to wait for you to not wake up, to not collect on your ‘gift’ every goddamn second of my life.” 

Clarke blinked. “I need a new shirt.” Bellamy laughed, harshly, as she started pulling her sweater over her head. 

“Are you not listening?” 

“I always listen,” Clarke answered promptly. “I just think that what you’re saying is bullshit, because you’re a nice person and even if I didn’t call you you’d probably show up anyways.” 

“I don’t think you understand, Clarke,” Bellamy called as she rifled through her drawers. “I learned how to get blood out of carpet when I was eleven. I pulled a pair of scissors out of your neck in between third and fourth period my junior year and then turned around and took a history test with dried blood falling off my knuckles onto the essay question. I pulled three yards of seaweed out of your mouth during a thunderstorm, and every time, you woke up and you acted like it was just an annoying part of your routine that you had to get through.” 

When Clarke emerged in the doorway, wearing yet another one of Bellamy’s old sweatshirts, he already had his hand wrapped around the doorknob. “You’re leaving?” Clarke asked, dumbfounded, her hair still in a static halo around her ears. 

“You’re not the one who has to watch your best friend bleed out,” Bellamy almost whispered. His voice was the only sound in the room until he shut the door behind him, softly, with a small click. The smell of metal and burning hair still filled his nostrils, even after he was in his own living room, clicking through channels absentmindedly and trying to get the picture of the door closing on Clarke’s distressed face out of his mind. 

\- -

It was two years before Clarke died again. Bellamy tried to let his life move forward, he really did. He got his teaching degree and started attempting to shove some knowledge into the brains of high schoolers, he called Octavia on the phone a lot, he even got a girlfriend for a couple of months. But even then, it felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

They saw each other, every now and again, at bars and parties and at the houses of mutual friends. They had Thanksgiving together because Octavia wanted to see them both, and it was terse and awkward because every time she took something out of the oven Bellamy held his breath and every time Clarke looked at him it was like she was seeing a ghost. 

Octavia didn’t ask for a joint Thanksgiving the next year. She did ask, though, what was going on. Bellamy had to tell her that they’d fought over something stupid, like they used to when they were younger and Clarke had only died once and Bellamy didn’t yet have the crushing weight of her life on his shoulders. He said they hadn’t worked through it yet and they might not, because they were busy and hurt, and Octavia was gone so what was the point, really. She believed him, and gave him some life advice (“stop being such an asshole”). Bellamy went back to pretending it wasn’t a problem. 

They didn’t see each other again until the accident. 

\- -

Bellamy had no idea why he was driving forty miles over the speed limit, and he didn’t know why he forgot to avoid the icy patch on the highway, and he certainly didn’t know how his car flipped five times and slammed to a stop against the concrete wall next to the shoulder of the road. He had no idea who dialed 911, and he wasn’t sure how long it took for the ambulance to arrive, but he knew, even through the blood dripping from his neck and down over his eyes as he hung from the ceiling, that the flash of blonde sprinting across the snow was Clarke. 

She wrenched the door open first, rattling things off into the tiny radio she’d unstrapped from the waistband of her pants. When she looked up and saw it was Bellamy, her eyes went wide and she started scrabbling at the seatbelt, trying to release him, all thoughts of the radio forgotten. 

Clarke kept whispering his name and tugging on the seatbelt, and it was Bellamy who smelled the gas in the air first, who licked the taste of blood off his lips and tried to yell, to warn her. He didn’t succeed, but another EMT from the ambulance did, shouting and waving his arms around. 

It got stronger as Clarke finally released Bellamy from his seat, and the first spark lit as he weakly pressed his hands against the roof of the car, trying to gain purchase to climb out the shattered window. 

The car went up in flames with Clarke in the passenger’s seat, having just pushed Bellamy out and onto the snow, looking equal parts grim and triumphant. 

Bellamy watched, with blood in his eyelashes, as her hair caught fire. 

\- -

Clarke came to see him in the hospital, to put flowers on his little side table and to squeeze his hand to let him know she was alive. Bellamy gripped back, hard, like he was never going to let go again. 

She forced his hand when she kissed his cheek and told him she was never going to come back. That he was right, it was unfair to make him watch her die. 

“I didn’t even watch until the end,” she whispered into his ear. “And it was still shit.” 

Bellamy let her walk out the door because he was connected to the bed by tubes and wires, and because, no matter what he said, he always did what she wanted, no matter how hard he tried to tell himself that he didn’t. 

\- -

A year later, Bellamy’s phone rang in the middle of the night. He’d always been a light sleeper, and when he heard the default marimba of the ringtone Octavia was always trying to get him to change, it didn’t take him very long to grab his phone and sit up in bed. 

Clarke’s face was taking up the whole of his screen, the dumb face she’d set as her contact picture showing her scrunched up nose and a smile he hadn’t seen in a long time. Bellamy swiped sideways and pressed the phone up to his ear without a second thought. He’d done this many times before. 

“Clarke?” he asked, quiet, voice still husky with sleep. “Are you okay?” 

“When am I not?” Clarke breathed out, hard, and Bellamy could hear a rattling in her chest. “I, uh, I just have nobody else to call, you know, when I’m bleeding out in an alley-“ 

“What?” 

“I went walking, and some guy got pissed I didn’t have my wallet on me- I don’t know, I just didn’t want to be alone right now, I’m sorry-“ 

Bellamy was already throwing off his covers and reaching for his shirt without turning the lights on, his phone clamped between his shoulder and his cheek. “Where are you?” 

“No, it’s okay, you don’t have to-“ Clarke’s voice cut off suddenly as she began to cough. “This is when the magic happens, remember? I’ll be fine-” 

“Clarke,” Bellamy said, and there was a weight to his voice that made Clarke go quiet on the other side of the line. “Tell me where you are.” 

“I’m in the alley behind The Dropship,” she answered, resigned, and Bellamy breathed a sigh of relief knowing that was a five minute walk from his apartment and he didn’t have to find a taxi at three in the morning. 

The 911 operator picked up while he was sprinting down his street, bare feet slapping against the sidewalk. “It’s my friend,” he wheezed. “She just called me and said some guy stabbed her outside of The Dropship, it’s a bar, I’m on my way now. No, I have to run, I have to hang up.” When Bellamy found Clarke, she was lying in a pool of her own blood and looking very much like she was ready to die. Bellamy wasn’t ready to let her.    
He rode in the ambulance next to her, informing the EMTs that she was under no circumstances allowed to let her heart stop beating. “I don’t care what she says,” he told them as they chattered into their radios. “She needs to stay alive.” 

“We’re doing our best, sir,” they all assured him, as did the doctors he met at the hospital. The nicest ones were the nurses who talked to him in the waiting room, told him that the doctors may be arrogant assholes but they were payed a bunch of money to save lives and they did it well. It sounded a little too much like the way Clarke always described her mother, and Bellamy wasn’t sure whether that made him feel better or worse. He hadn’t quite reached a decision when the doctor reemerges and commences talking to Bellamy in medically advanced terms. The only three words that register in his brain are “she’ll make it.” 

He spends the rest of the night sitting in the waiting room because the nurses are saying she’s still sleeping and it’s not worth it to sneak him in until he can actually talk to her. Bellamy’s starting to realize why Clarke always spoke about the nurses that populated her childhood with such fondness when the sun comes up, and the sweet, tired looking nurse he’d met earlier, Maya, grabbed his arm and led him to Clarke. 

“She’s sleeping,” Maya whispered, “but I don’t want her to be alone when she wakes up.” 

“Thanks,” Bellamy replied, wishing he could say more. He was used to seeing Clarke after she died, when all that was left was the remnants of her wounds. This time, there were scratches on her face and needles in her arm. It left him feeling empty, like there wasn’t anything left for him to do but sit down in the chair next to Clarke’s bed and silently thank God it was cushioned. He was asleep in seconds.

Bellamy woke up to Clarke glaring and hissing “I hate you, you know that?” 

“No, you don’t,” Bellamy mumbled tiredly. 

“Yes I do.” Clarke glanced at the monitor and her IV with distaste. “You should’ve let me die. You always let me die before, why couldn’t you do it again?” 

Bellamy blinked the sleep out of his eyes, took a deep breath, and let out a year’s worth of silence. “I watched, Clarke. There was never anything I could do, other than watch your be completely and totally still and pray you hadn’t run out of chances. And you don’t say anything, you’ve never said anything, but I know it hurts. I’ve watched you in pain for my entire life, never able to do anything to help you. And this time, I could do something, so, please, hate me for trying to save someone I love from dying alone in an alley.” 

The door opened and Maya breezed in, grinning at Clarke and chattering over the charged silence obliviously. “You’re awake, that’s awesome! I just have to check your vitals, go over your chart, make sure you’re comfortable- but the older nurses have already told me you’re an old hand at hanging around in hospitals. I’ll just be a minute longer, I don’t want to bother you two.” Clarke had taken Bellamy’s hand sometime during Maya’s spiel, and neither of them let go after she’d bustled out after pronouncing Clarke a “medical marvel.” 

“I think about the first time a lot, you know,” Clarke said in a strangled voice, once the door had closed behind Maya. “How you smeared icing on my dress to cover the blood, and helped me up the stairs. That was the first time you held my hand.” 

“I remember,” Bellamy muttered, suddenly hyperaware of the way her fingers felt wrapped around his, the sickly sweet smell of cake frosting filling his nostrils. 

“You were so kind,” Clarke whispered, and there were tears in her eyes. “And I was so scared. People don’t tell you what it feels like, to die. They always tell you it’s better after, that you get ice cream and beds made out of clouds. It just hurt, and then I’d come back.”

Clarke took a deep, shuddering breath, and Bellamy could feel the half moons of her fingernails digging deep into the skin of his palms. “When I came back to you, it didn’t hurt as much. I didn’t realize- I didn’t want- I never meant to give you all of the pain.” 

“I’ll take all of it,” Bellamy said, bringing Clarke’s hand up to his lips. “I just want you alive.” 

Clarke laughed, and all the animosity left in the room melted, like the years they’d spent in anger evaporated. “That’s one thing I can promise.” 

When they left the hospital, Bellamy took Clarke home to his apartment. Bellamy told Clarke he loved her in the cab, and Clarke told Bellamy he was an asshole in the elevator. Neither of them had felt that happy in a long time. 

\- -

The next time Clarke died, Bellamy held her hand until she coughed her way back into existence. She spat the hard candy she’d choked on onto the carpet and they’d climbed into bed, Bellamy rubbing soothing circles into Clarke’s back.

The next morning, Bellamy stretched, languid, and reveled at the feel of waking up with her. “You’re back again.”

“Yeah,” Clarke said, mid yawn. “I seem to have a knack for that.” 

“What’s my knack?” 

Clarke hummed, her lips on Bellamy’s neck, and he felt it travel down his arteries and send a shiver through his whole body. “You are full of so much magic,” she whispered into his skin. “You always pick up the phone on the first ring. You never lose a knight in a game of chess, even if you lose your king. Your bedhead looks intentional, you only buy soft T-shirts, you never leave fruit lying around long enough for there to be flies.” 

Clarke traced patterns across Bellamy’s shoulders, and she took a deep breath. “You have this incredible way of making everyone feel like they’re the safest person in the world.”

Bellamy rolled Clarke over, kissing her half because he loved what she was saying and half because he didn’t. Clarke ran her fingers through his hair, laughing into his mouth when she hit a snarl and got stuck. 

“I know yours” Bellamy declared, all in one breath, like he was scared if he waited any longer it wouldn’t come out of his mouth at all. 

Clarke looked up, and the sunlight shafted across her face.

“You always come back when I need you.” 

Bellamy had barely finished speaking when Clarke crushed her lips against his, hard, like she wanted to get stuck. “I told you I’m magic,” she whispered into him. He couldn’t agree more.

**Author's Note:**

> so that was that. i hope you enjoyed it. come find me on tumblr (officialbellarketrash or emullz, cause i'm greedy and i have two), maybe teach me how to embed links using html code because i'm dumb.
> 
> thank u for reading my lil story


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